


hold back the river

by fealle



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Domestic Fluff, M/M, POV Second Person, Schmoop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-06
Updated: 2016-06-06
Packaged: 2018-07-12 16:23:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,425
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7113331
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fealle/pseuds/fealle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>a fic where tsukki and kuroo are roommates and they fall in love. kuroo is a guitarist and tsukki is a school teacher.</p>
            </blockquote>





	hold back the river

**Author's Note:**

> xposted from [here](http://fealle.tumblr.com/post/145494004457/fic-hold-back-the-river-a-fic-where-tsukki-and). my layout kills long fics; at least with ao3 this is more readable.
> 
> "" dialogues are kuroo's. - dialogues are tsukki's. apologies for the confusion this may cause, i was trying things out.

  **1.**

There is a quiet moment in between winter and summer where the ground is dry enough that even the slightest bit of a spark turns into a forest fire. I was telling you this while reading about the spread of a fire halfway across the globe in a cafe where we decided to meet. Cafes bore you. You don’t like the music they play, you don’t like the crowd, but you’re here because you answered the ad about roommates, and after a few Skype calls we’ve decided to meet.

It’s a dark grey morning. The weatherman says it’ll rain in the evening; god, how I wanted that to be now, because the humidity was choking me and it was making your shirt cling to your frame in a manner that makes my glance linger a bit too long just near your clavicles where the gaze can be construed as something polite enough that I’m not looking away, but I’m definitely not not-looking. You tell me your name is Kuroo, you’ve only got a few things on hand that can be moved easily once you move - (later, I’d find out it’s because you’ve been moving all your life, and after a while a certain disaffection for homes becomes perfectly normal, however lonely that can be ….) - and that you were a guitar player in some band while doubling as a DJ in a radio station I don’t listen to. “It’s fine,” you answer, smiling at my confusion at the station’s frequency. “Radio’s not exactly a thing that people our age listen to nowadays, and the station I’m working at is a college kids’ station, y'know what I mean?” I don’t, but I resolve to figure out more for future reference, and you tell me you’re gratified at the offer.

You pay for the coffee, despite my protests. You tuck the chairs back into the tables, you frown at the way people order complicated, alchemical mixes for their coffee on the counter; you wave goodbye to the barista you don’t even know like you’ve known them all your life. There are marks on the pads of your fingers, you air guitar me a sample of a song your band is working on. I try to remember the things we talked about before on the way back to the apartment. It is easy to forget in this humidity. Stepping outside in the sun is like burning in the furnace but a kind of burning in which you welcome it yourself and therefore it chafes less. One hopes.

***

The apartment isn’t anything to boast about. You remark that there really isn’t any difference from the pictures I’ve shown you and the real thing, and that’s true. It’s as bland as most apartments are with the exception of a table that was full of students’ essays I was in the middle of grading, for weeks now. You ask me about my work, I wave a hand to dismiss the subject. “I don’t like interrogations, Kuroo,” I tell you tersely; you laugh; you apologize. And then you stand in the middle of the room checking the amount of space in this sterile house, sterile not because of my own inclinations for the lack of art - for myself, I really like a more rhythmic place, and would have more artworks if I could - but the problem, of course, is that I can’t afford it at all.

There are some people that are made to be standing in a frame.

You were one such person. I was finishing my coffee in the kitchen, looking at you, when I realized this slowly, as when one carefully imagines rain descending on a burning forest. Something shifts in the perspective; it was more than just a rearrangement of the objects in play. At the corner of my eyes you were a figure in a black t-shirt moving with carefree gentleness as your fingers carefully hovered over the tiny succulents I kept near the windows, the cat who was hesitant to approach you, quiet in the way you turn the door knob and breathe in the air from the open window coming from your soon-to-be room. You tell me: “everything looks magnificent.”

I ask you what kind of a guy calls a sparse, almost college-like room ‘magnificent.’

“When all things are in their proper places and there’s room enough for a person to feel comfortable in, that’s magnificent enough, don’t you think? Anyway, the walls are pretty good here. I tend to practice guitar in the evenings, but because you’re here then, I’ll do it in the mornings when you’re out teaching the leaders of the future.”

A slight wink. A raised eyebrow. I shake my head at the comment. You smile. I ask you when the movers will be coming, friends or whatever, for your things to be here, and if you need help, and you shake your head.

“Don’t worry about it.”

But I need advanced notice, time to make preparations, I might not have time to help you settle if you come at a time that I’m unavailable.

“Don’t worry about it, tsukishima.”

Fine.

That seemed to be your attitude, for a while: don’t worry about it, things will sort themselves out, everything is going to be alright.

** 2. **

A line from a poem: “since it is not permitted to dissect human beings, I have in fact nothing to do with them.”

The awkward transition from casual conversation to something a bit more personal is one of the more cavalier tricks up in your sleeve that I’m having trouble grasping things with, in particular because I am utterly private about so many things, and you were clever about the things you wanted to reveal. _Too_ clever. I don’t ask about how all of your things fit in two duffel bags, your outfits economical in the way that made it seem you were always on the run, or have been running away, for the past couple of years you’ve been living, and yet I bring up the subject quietly anyway, curiousity getting the better of me as I take note of the worn handles of your bag. Your reply: “I’m in between a lot of things right now, traveling with the band’s kind of been a great way to get to know people outside of my neighborhood.” But it’s a canned response and I regret the way your face shuts at the question. You accept my apology, confused but thankful.

In return, you parry with questions that ease me into a time where things were more difficult and innocent, or maybe only made innocent because I was younger. A list of questions you have asked which I have attempted to deflect with varying results: _why don’t you have any photos of your family around, if you talk about them a lot? Who’s the guy who keeps leaving messages in the phone, calling you Kei, he sounds like he really wants to talk to you. Tsukki - can I call you that? - that’s a cute nickname, by the way, you’ve got a letter there inviting you to a party somewhere._ And so on.

\- I _have_ photos. They’re just not around, I never got the time to decorate. Ignore that guy, I’ve called him back. (I didn’t. I sent a text last week, that’s more than enough.) I don’t want you to call me Tsukki. (You call me Tsukki anyway.) That’s fine, leave the invitation, I don’t really want to go.

The piano comes alive in the evening when you play in it and I sometimes wish I continued what meagre lessons I had in grade school with instruments, but my fingers were never made for anything so delicate, I can barely even talk to anyone on the phone, and anyway there are papers that always need to be marked. your music is not my music but for the first few nights we tried to get used to each other’s routine I allowed it to be my music, anyway; I carry the notes in my head and I hum them as I make lesson plans for the week and when I prepare for breakfast tomorrow and all the way until I go to bed, yawning as I mumble good night, you smiling as your hand gently leads me to my room on the small of my back, so gentle that you are barely touching my back, and you wish me the same thing: “good night, I’m off to a gig, I’ll see you whenever.” 'Whenever’ is a long time to make someone wait when they’re painfully aware of how warm your hand is at their back where they feel vulnerable. In the dim light of the apartment late in the evening you were close enough for me to be able to notice how your lashes were so much longer than I thought they were, despite being hidden by your rat’s nest of a hair.

Door opens. You smile. Exeunt Tsukishima Kei (left). Good evening, good evening. My back burns and something like wildfire spreads across my thoughts as I remember your lashes when you close your eyes. The most embarrassing thing is to resist the urge to kiss them. I cover my mouth in shame, fingers wiping across my mouth in a way of chastising myself. _You are a total stranger_ , I whisper quietly. I think of the duffel bags that you have, worn from traveling everywhere, come to rest on the other side of the wall I have my back against as I sleep. _You are a total stranger_. I wanted to believe this was real, because if I don’t, then who else will?

***

There needs to be a machine that excises emotions from your memory to lay them out in plain view, with causes and effects made clear, in order to trace when and where was it that a man realizes he was burning from the weight of his choices by the time the clock moves again. If it can be traced from shared interests between two men, the way one is able to trace a symptom from the disease sometimes, then maybe the whole problem of togetherness wouldn’t have been so fraught with stillborn gestures and cautious talk. On the whole: athletic, but only in school. Played the same sport, liked almost the same subjects. Currently watching the same shows, interested in the way certain shows hold each other’s attraction, putting it on a queue of a long list made under your name, or mine’s, thinking that it’s normal we complement each other. That’s called good luck. And then there were the nights where we argue about music, about how your favourites are bad or just plain worse than mine, never better, and if they were the latter it’s grudgingly admitted with a smile and a looped playlist that continued to play until the wee hours of the morning, where I find myself dragging myself out of the table I’d fallen asleep in while reading books for the class, while you gently remind me that I’ll have to leave in two hours.

Can one say that things have a true beginning, then? It’s nothing like how people make realizations the way thunder splits the skies open during a storm, or the way things just fall or slide into pieces as a mystery was solved. The way things settled between us was slow, excruciatingly so, but there were things we knew to accept because they just were, it was inevitable for them to have a place in the domestic atmosphere of our sterile home, inevitable that they’ve become part of our daily ritual too: how I know how much cream you want for your coffee, the way you tend to play more jazz in the evening when I’m around, the way you bump into me jokingly when we wash the dishes, suds coming up to where your sleeves were rolled up over your elbows. The soft music that follows late in the evening while you’re having a smoke in the balcony and you call me over, excitedly, to take a picture of a flower in bloom by one of the succulents in the boxed garden beside the window. Or how you were so excited when you tell me about the black cat you’ve met whom you’ve been allowed to pet on your way home while I sigh, exasperatedly, that the apartment doesn’t allow having too many pets, and that you shouldn’t train this cat to want you. You never know what happens to someone when you allow them to want or when you expect them to wait for that slight gesture of affection that binds them to your scent forever.

Or can they have a beginning in the way things unfold sometimes from the most innocuous of things? Like that day where you were reading the essays as I marked them, smiling at some earnest freshman’s words about Shakespeare:

“Tsukishima. your kids are a bright bunch,” you said, reading over their essays in their best English, trying to tell me what _Romeo and Juliet_ is all about, what people think when they think they are in love. (“Out of her favour, where I am in love”?) “Although I’m surprised about you becoming a school teacher given what  you’ve told me about your high school years. Good enough to be invited to several training camps, isn’t that a good thing?”

\- you’d be surprised at the amount of willpower it takes to keep up that competitive spirit. It was nice when you had a good rival, but …. when you grow older and into your senior year, people’s priorities change, and sometimes that means they have to move away. Dealing with the fallout wasn’t nice.

You were quiet for a while, after telling me a blithe _yes, that’s right_. People change when you realize what kinds of things you’re willing to put up with and what kinds of things you’re not willing to do; or when the kinds of things you find interesting change and then you’re left chasing a dream that used to give you a really good high but nowadays just leaves a sour taste in your mouth. You told me you understand, repeating what you’ve just told me before but not understanding why there was a need to repeat it. Finally, perhaps in an effort to remove yourself from the situation entirely before it digs into your bones again, the same way that kind of disappointment can fill two duffel bags worn from traveling and trying to convince yourself you gotta be someone before you settle somewhere, you tell me you were going to leave for the evening to pick up a couple of beers.

\- cool. it’s not the first time I’ve tried marking while drunk, anyway.

Your back was a little stiffer when you left.

Where was I to start in an effort to excise emotions, to trace where inevitability occurs? One might as well draw a line in between the stars. Yamaguchi once told me that that that was one of my greatest flaws, I exaggerate everything to the point of futility. I like to think of it as exhausting options insofar as possibility is still an option, but then again, I’ve never been the kind of honest person my friend has always been.

***

** WHAT IF KUROO’S DRUNKEN CONFESSION THAT NIGHT WAS SPOKEN POETRY INSTEAD, OR: MY MIND TRANSFORMED THIS MEMORY INTO SOMETHING ELSE, AND I BLAME THE ALCOHOL BECAUSE WHAT ELSE SHOULD I DO? ** a poem by Tsukishima Kei feat. a drunken Kuroo.

In my younger years, I was captain, and I had good friends. Nothing else to complain about, I was lucky enough to be able to say:  
high school was probably the happiest years I’ve had in my life, and growing up, I really missed that kind of  
community, you know? It’s the kind of connection I think you can form easily when you were younger but not when you’re an adult, not like  
our age, when we’re a bit more cynical about the state of things and anyway, you come to a point where you tell yourself,  
man, it’s just not worth it, high school relationships are so petty and full of drama, I’m over that, I’m an adult now. Got more things to worry about.  
But when you’re an adult nobody tells you how to rebuild relationships from the ground up much less find someone you can easily connect with  
the way you can find your own group back in high school. I’m rambling right now, Tsukki, I’m sorry. It’s the alcohol, I’m sorry.  
Anyway what I’m saying is that when you’ve got it that good you kind of expect things to continue that way.  
I got into a good school, good team, but it was a struggle to maintain expectations and after a while it just got to me, I hated  
that I can’t become what I expected to be, what everyone expected to me, so maybe being a captain got to me after all - especially the part where you  
wanna try and set out to be a good example but you keep failing, your marks are a mess, your job is a clusterfuck, I hated my professors,  
economy’s a shit place to be, who has time to maintain dreams in this age. But I regret being that cynical and now that I’ve found  
my friends again in this small band, I’ve sunk my teeth into them and I don’t wanna be lost again,  
I’m so used to living off of the kindness of strangers and disappointing people I like,  
but I still believe I want to be someone, and believing in what I can do, what my strengths are -  
that’s probably the only thing I know about myself right now. 

** DISCUSSION QUESTIONS. **

After hearing the confession, your drunken mind has to make a choice to react while Kuroo’s finishing the remainder of his beer. Please choose from the following:

** A) ** T ell him you understand, especially the part about breaking expectations and disappointing people. Tell him that as the guy who’s been on the other side of the fence watching his hero, it’s only recently that you’d considered how heavy that feeling is and you sympathize deeply. Consider looking into his eyes as you say this, taking a deep drink from your beer because the last time you were close enough to look directly into his eyes you remember still feeling that deep, intense urge to kiss his eyelids.

** B) ** O r maybe you can hold his hand. Maybe you can just slip your fingers in between the spaces of his own and not say a word at all; perhaps he’ll interpret your silence as a sympathetic gesture despite the fact that the topic at hand is something you’re actually intimately familiar with, and could talk a lecture on. After all, you still want to convince yourself that he’s a stranger. Strangers shouldn’t make you want to take care of them or ache for them to the point that you want to hold them, but you’re not so cold as to ignore someone who is obviously carrying a certain kind of weight with them.

** C) ** But perhaps reality is cruel. Perhaps the only option is to shrug your shoulders and tell him, “you should’ve known better than to stake your life in some kind of club. It’s not like that kind of obsession lasts beyond high school; what are you, a child? Just because you’re passionate about something doesn’t mean you should’ve pursued it to its end. Passion is a feeling, not a plan. If you wanted to succeed you should’ve had a plan instead. I hate this conversation. I hate people like you. I’ve been _hurt_ by people like you. Can’t believe i’m stupid enough to live with another one again. It’s like with niichan when he used to pretend he was an ace, he never had to do that for me, but - ”

** FINAL NOTES. **

(This memory is one of many. Either way you have an eternity to ruminate about how your decision may or may not have ruined or started things in between the two of you, especially when you’re not even sure if there is the possibility of him liking you in the first place. The difference is in the execution. At the moment you have three hours to decide how you’ll torment yourself after before you have to get ready for work. You may begin.)

** ANSWER KEY. **

****

****

** B.) ** You are not as cruel as you think yourself to be, and later that evening, you find that sleeping on his shoulder is actually a lot nicer feeling than you expect. You wake up still holding his hand.

** 3. **

I’ve never actually watched you perform before, and I’ve always made excuses not to go. Maybe you realized this, maybe you didn’t, but either way you are always so unfailingly polite when you request me to come with you to a gig. I have a few reasons not to go, mostly because I really have no interest in being in such close proximity to so many people all at the same time, even if it’s just for the duration of the performance itself; being with other people is tiring. The first time I tried explaining it to you, you nodded in understanding and apologized and gave me my space. This, I accept and I am grateful for.

The other reason is a lot more selfish and i’m embarrassed to admit it, but there are moments in the sparseness of our house - ours, now - where I just appreciate you and the way your fingers move across the piano or the guitar when you sing, and I apologize for teasing you about your singing voice so much and how I told you it sounds like a dying cat, it really doesn’t. It sounds warm and smooth and deep, and it distracts me from learning my keys when you try and teach me how to play the piano while sitting beside you, your fingers over my own as you teach me the sounds. “This is an F,” you tell me, moving a finger over the key, “and this is an A, C … just like when you learned them back in grade school, you know?” It’s a bit hard to concentrate when you’ve got a warm mouth moving close next to my ear, and I constantly miss the keys. And then you say something stupid in that tone of voice, like the way you get so intensely quiet after I practice some notes over your keyboard and you tell me, in barely restrained feeling, how beautiful my fingers are. Embarrassed, I hold my hands on my lap as you laugh awkwardly to cover up just how honest you were - just for a moment - while I stammer my thanks.

Or there was that time with the guitar, as well, when your hands were over me as you teach me how to hold it and you help me strum the first few notes of ridiculous nursery rhymes. it was hilarious except for the part where my lips brushed your cheek and you continued to smile and sing as if nothing happened but my hands were shaking at the realization of what I just did and the dread that you will notice and stop and the moment will be ruined, but that’s not what happened and instead, you continued to hold my hand over the strings anyway, murmuring, “you have to let me, Tsukki.” Let you what? I could not even look in your eyes, but at that very moment I felt like I would do anything to hear you sing, because at least when you sing you’re not calling me in that tone of voice that makes me shiver, and that is a sacrifice I’m willing to make.

So I asked you, instead, to sing your favourite song, in whatever language you want.

“…. _I’m just a soul whose intentions are good / oh lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood._ ”

***

Even in the rain you would sing. Even that time when you locked yourself out of the apartment and I had to come pick you up on the bus stop so we can walk back together, you holding the umbrella in your hands, so cold from the weather, you would sing me songs from your band that you wrote or lines from a song you were listening to just before I arrived, your voice carrying through the sound of water or thunder. It made the trip longer if only because I walked as slowly as I can to remember this sight: your hair wet from waiting, your voice low as you sing, fingers tapping on the side of your bag as you made out the beat, your arm as you leant slightly on me while we walk. You would ask me to join you. I didn’t want to, I always refused, but then you’d teach me how to sing, and the two of us together, our voices would meld so tightly in song that my voice would falter in the middle because it’s too much for me to think about.

That was the night you asked me to stay with you.

I was awake all morning doing work until you came by the kitchen table and poured me another cup of tea. My hands were massaging my wrist and then you took my sore hand from me, your fingers loose around my wrist in case I want to pull back, but I didn’t, of course I didn’t, how could I? And then, in a quiet voice you asked me, if you could kiss my hand, if it would be possible to kiss your wrist, you were feeling desperate but didn’t explain what for, you couldn’t look me in the eyes as you said it, you just wanted to be able to kiss my hand. All this, while the rain pressed against the roof and the cold seeped into the apartment and the only other thing warm and alive there in that box was you. I nodded, only once, and then you took my hand and turned it and placed a kiss in the inside of my wrist, soft and gentle, I felt like my bones would dissolve, like sugar in the tongue, like salt in the sea.

“I’m sorry for - being so sudden - ”

You sounded like you couldn’t even believe you spoke at all.

“Your perfume.” You lick your lips. “I want it all over my skin.”

\- that can be arranged.

You look at me.

I look away, telling you: if you wanted.

“If,” you say, laughing. Shaking your head. Smiling nervously, while you held my hand. “If, he says.”

Excuses as ephemeral as fumes. Hermes Caleche was a bottle I chose for my eighteenth birthday after I told the saleslady, _I want to smell like leather_. And here I was. Time present; skin against leather; your mouth on my stomach; your name, on my lips. Outside, the rain. Outside, nothing but soft voices. A sharp moan. a shout tapering to silence, and then - the shift of skin against skin. I don’t go to your concerts anymore, you’ve spoiled me.

***

That happens again and again, the way sometimes it seems inevitable that rain just falls from the sky or the way sunlight bursts through a cloudy veneer after the storm. Late in the evening you would come to me and gently shuffle the papers away and tell me to go to bed; “go to bed” meaning your bed, a double bed with an obnoxiously red blanket because red is your favourite colour and you want my pale skin against the sheets. You like it when my face matches the bedding. You like it when my mouth is open against the pillows. You like it when the red of my lips is smeared against your wall when we get rough and you push my face against it, fingers clawing on the surface as I call your name, again and again and again. It would be demeaning to say it of anyone else but not you, not when I remember meeting you back at the time when things were burning, the cafe and the cheap coffee and everything, walking into a furnace saying your name followed by: _oh, oh_. I did kiss your eyelids, I felt your lashes against my lips while you tilted my head back and bit on my neck, oh, _oh_. Repeat performance as necessary.

Or sometimes we just fall into mine simply because you wanted to feel less lonely, or because there is still the sensation of ringing in your ears after a long, drawn-out concert that goes late in the morning and I am just awoken by the feel of a body dropping itself on top of me, limbs wrapping around my chest seeking warmth, your breath against my skin as you listen to my heart until your breathing evens out, until the silence imposes itself onto your bones, until you’ve rubbed your face against my perfume and have smeared it all over your skin. I hook my fingers in the pockets of your pants feeling the guitar pick you use for the night, the keys to the apartment you seldom remember to bring with you but you did, tonight, because you wanted to be able to run back to me as quickly as you can.

That was new, the feeling of being made into a home instead of just being part of the home. Excising this memory is difficult and I can’t pick out the strands that will allow me to understand what shifted, when was it that we were suddenly closer, when was it that made you feel this was something beyond a few songs about brave souls with good intentions and a desperate need to kiss, to desire, to want. Memory is a haze that consumes the mind. I kiss your temple gently as I run my fingers through your hair. There are flowers blooming in our little garden, I remember. In the dark you whisper my name. And then you go to sleep.

** 4. **

By accident you find my school photos. This is the equivalent of finding a bomb and I approach you with the gravity of a diplomat understanding that one is about to go to war, but you are ignorant of these things because I chose it to be this way. You see, you weren’t the only one skilled with the art of maneuvering and deflecting conversation, though the signs were a little bit difficult to ignore from the beginning, I suppose, from the friends that were always mentioned but never seen to the brother who always leaves messages in the phone that were never answered. Your fingers sift through them delicately and you nearly drop them when I let my bag fall onto the floor by accident, my eyes on the firm grasp of your fingers on the corners of the photographs.

“I was looking for my keys - ”

\- in the drawer. Where they always are.

“I didn’t realize you had your photos there too. And I got curious.”

My fingers were tented against each other over my lap, studying your face.

Perhaps the most embarrassing part of this story is that there really isn’t anything to be concerned with or to be terrified of with regards to the photographs or the story behind the photographs. Nothing about my past is terrible or tragic; it’s as commonplace as disappointments can be. But my pride was sore. I had kept all of these from you because I wanted to have my own secrets, I wanted to have something that I didn’t have to share with anyone else, I wanted my own resolution for this mess that started from my childhood when my brother made me believe - or when I believed, wholeheartedly - that he was everything in the world. I had kept that from you because I had held onto my grudges for so long that airing them out now seemed illogical, even downright pitiful. I do not want to be pitied. I do not want to be insulted. Each and every one of us holds a furnace from their childhood where all seemingly illicit and painful memories are kept which incubates the heart for as long as we live.

You put the photographs back.

It was only later that I realize that I’m shaking. You look at me carefully, the way I was stubbornly refusing to move from the door, and then you sigh. You walk up to me and I flinch when you touch my face. You withdraw your hand; only for you to take my chin carefully to tilt my face to look up at you, which I’ve been doing all this time anyway, but there are certain times when looking at someone you admire feels like making a commitment to burn and that was what I was feeling right now.

\- There was nothing terrible in those photos.

“That’s good.”

\- But they’re my photos, and I don’t appreciate you going through them.

“I apologize.”

\- That is alright.

“May I ask a question?”

\- Maybe.

“Will you talk to your brother?”

\- …. really, what we do with our lives isn’t your business, Kuroo.

“It is. Because that tells me you don’t always know how to deal with your anger and disappointments, and that’s not the kind of attitude you’d like to bring with you if you’re entering a relationship.”

\- …. a relationship?

“…. well, what else do you call this? We can hardly call ourselves neighbours or strangers.”

I purse my lips together in a thin line. You take your hand off of my chin, thumb brushing against my lips, and then you slip your hands into your pockets the way one would keep a secret in their fist.

“I’m not expecting a miracle overnight. Just … talk to him.”

\- I won’t do this to you, if you’re worried -

“I’m worried. But not for me.”

\- ….

“Talk to him.”

And then you kissed me.

There are stories that end with those five words. Five words that can be said in a confession, in a hushed voice or in a triumphant scream. There are stories of lovers everywhere which begin with those five words and end with those five words.

***

My brother tells me, mother is wondering when I will come home. That I need to write more to them about how I’m doing in the big city, that they’re happy for my work, that they’re thankful I’m enjoying it there. My brother is asking me if I’m taking care of myself, if my roommate is really nice. He talks to you sometimes. (I was ready to take this as betrayal, but he sounded a bit happy saying it, so I had to excise those feelings out of me the way blood is sometimes let out to expel malicious humours.) This Kuroo-kun, he’s teaching you how to play the guitar? That’s really nice, Kei.

\- do you remember, when we were kids, and I was angry at you for weeks because -

“Kei, you always get angry really easily over the smallest things. You’ve gotten better now though - better! - but back then …. you need to be more specific ….”

\- …. I meant, well … I mean - back when we were kids, I was angry at you when I found out you weren’t the ace - when I found out.

“…. oh Kei. Yes, but I always - ”

\- And then I didn’t talk to you. That was a long time –

“Ten years - ”

\- I …. well, I just thought -

“You were completely justified in being angry. I shouldn’t have done - ”

\- I wish -

You, across the table, holding my hand.

\- I - was callous - and I was - I’m sorry.

You, across the table, slipping your fingers in between my own, holding my hand as I blink back the threat of tears, my eyes stinging from remembering, but: there is no safer way of cutting memory from a person, and one has to make do with the kinds of opportunities one is presented with in order to set affairs straight.

“I …. Kei! that’s very … it’s alright. I told you, it’s not your fault.”

\- It had to be said. I wanted to say it. After all these years.

“Kei, it’s not your fault.”

But his voice had dimmed to a whisper and I felt it, I felt everything, I wanted to burn.

And you, across the table, smiling, kissing my knuckles gently, one by one, as if to say, _we are not at war. Come rest_. You have come to lick my wounds. Nothing is as embarrassing as I have previously imagined, what you wanted to see was for me to be happy, and that was a humbling wish I had sought to grant. Not ashamed to say I loved you because you looked so - so good. Not ashamed to say either that I wanted to be with you because that was the equivalent of summer, coming out of the thaw, gladly beyond. For once.

** 5. **

Back in the bedroom again but this time with the guitar in my hands and you behind me, your legs around my own, both of us sitting on the bed as you teach me how to strum notes against the strings. After a while you leave me alone to try a few notes on by myself, and then watch over my shoulder as I open a book of songs, and I try out a few ballads, simple ones that I can follow with my hands across the wood, feeling the notes one by one as you inhale my perfume against the skin.

September was an unusually warm month this year; the kind of heat that goes through your clothes as it moves through the air. Your tongue is on the arc of my neck, your hands insistent around my waist. The guitar is discarded in place of hands that roam across my chest. Soft tongue against throat. The strings replaced with the sound of my voice rising and falling. You wanted to hear me sing, you said, I never sing with you often enough. The truth is that my voice betrays me with so much emotion, such as now, when I call out your name again and again, each sigh as if to call you again for the first time in a cafe with cheap coffee, burning, burning. Even in the dark of the night.

Lights still on in the morning. _Don’t worry about it, things will be alright._

\--

end.

**Author's Note:**

> i'm @ [fealle.](http://fealle.tumblr.com/)


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